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So I guess what I am saying is, the reason why I am all for as many themes as DF can justify, is because I don't just like or anyway want everything DF does, there are some things I like a lot, some I am not interested in, so having more things means maybe there will be some that I like (hopefully not all in the same KS as this time)

Totally with you on this one. Didn't getmany Castles set since I didn't want any Gorgonite (only exception being the square roof platform). I don't like the Burrows (I will continue doing my tunnels with Cavern set) and since I don't care about LED at all I won't get anything from the Shrine of Sysuul (way too many LED pieces).

I feel the burrows would have done better had you not kept it such a surprise.I put enough money a side for one theme. Vaulted,traditional,snake,marble jade,trays, and then burrows makes seven themes. I could not afford to purchase enough burrows for a cool vertical set up so I passed. If I believed that you would do something like burrows with caverns I would put aside a lot more money.

First things first - less choice would have meant we'd have spent less.

Second thing - which I think gets lost here (though it may be a WAG) is that the KS is effectively to raise money to make the molds for future sales at retail. As has been pointed out that molds cost some serious cash and DF would probably make more profit on the KS with less molds. But it is not the reason for the KS to make as much profit as possible - although that is clearly an aspiration. It is to pay for all the molds and related overheads.

That I believe is why more is offered rather than focussing on fewer core pieces. I doubt a newcomer to the retail store will think there is too much choice and will more likely think wow there is a lot of stuff here - I will keep coming back.

So the primary driver in the KS is to pay for the molds for all the cool stuff Stefan and the DooFers dream up. If they make some profit then all is good. But their bread and butter will be made from retail sales.

As a reward to the KS backers who are basically taking a punt that this stuff will be good (and no complaints so far from here ) we get the product at a discount and the option of limited editions.

I believe Sewers and Mountains have proven that as 'secondary' sets they sell well at retail so no reason to think Burrows would not.

Don't forget that retail costs do not have to cover the overhead of creating the mold, that's been done via the Kickstarter so more gravy for DF to conjure up more goodies for the next KS.

There is one caveat with all this and that is the limited stock that DF keep for retail makes a few backers reluctant to invest in a system which may not be fully available in retail. That is a fine line that DF tries to tread and will not always be able to satisfy everyone.

That said... I LOVED the last KS. I liked the encounter rooms as a pledge levels, a fun way to group pieces. I just wish we could have mixed and matched and got similar discount as if we bought them in sequence. As we move to more add on heavy KS's i would love to see some stretch goal love for add-on spending (a more reasonable version of what was done in KS1). I ended up going about 10% over my budget and am super excited about what i got (more than anything since Caverns). So please don't view my posts as complaints, only as advocating for what i want like everyone else.

I super-agree with this. If there was a way to get a good discount based on money spent, rather than encounters picked, I would have made different choices, and left out the encounters i did not like (and that I got only because they were essentially "free" with DoD).

Just as an addendum: I do not in any way advocate that DF should only (or mainly) cater to big spenders.
For me, this is the first time I spend this much on a toy, and that happened because the KS5 offer had exactly what I wanted in themes, all concentrated in this KS. But I had been saving for a while, because...

Castles and Cities, I wasn't interested in, and did not took part in those KS at all (I kind of liked sewers, but disliked the concept of walls separated from floors).
I prefer to do exteriors in other ways (and if KS6 will be heavy on outdoors, I will happily skip it all, or just get the secondary themes).
If things had been organized with burrows in KS4 instead of mountains, and the opposite, I would have taken part in both, getting dungeons and burrows from those 2 KS.

So I guess what I am saying is, the reason why I am all for as many themes as DF can justify, is because I don't just like or anyway want everything DF does, there are some things I like a lot, some I am not interested in, so having more things means maybe there will be some that I like (hopefully not all in the same KS as this time)

That said... I LOVED the last KS. I liked the encounter rooms as a pledge levels, a fun way to group pieces. I just wish we could have mixed and matched and got similar discount as if we bought them in sequence. As we move to more add on heavy KS's i would love to see some stretch goal love for add-on spending (a more reasonable version of what was done in KS1). I ended up going about 10% over my budget and am super excited about what i got (more than anything since Caverns). So please don't view my posts as complaints, only as advocating for what i want like everyone else.

I actually agree with all of this. I, for example, wound up with four encounters (and several add ons) but still only Dungeon Level 1. I mean, I still got a great deal, but I do feel the issue here. Especially so for the add-on buyers, many of whom spent far more than I but passed on Zaltar's and so didn't even get the $10 discount by avoiding the BYOD.

I do have to agree though that the encounter concept for the KS was an excellent idea! As a first timer, it really allowed me to see how I could use the pieces I was getting. Much more so than if everything had just been based on a Core Set. At the same time, the encounters were absolutely giving you Core Sets in them (for the most part) just showcasing how they could be used. Likewise, showing the alternate builds for Dungeon Level 2 was a brilliant idea as it really showed how versatile the pieces are. Would have been nice to see more of that.

Regardless, here's hoping I win the lottery so I can clean out the DF webstore.

My argument has always been "My spending will be pretty much my budget. If you take that amount of money with fewer molds, DF makes more and I get better value."

marcoreds got the DoD BECAUSE of burrows! - Score one for DF. He is proof that my argument only holds true for me (and Dice4hire and others i am sure). Sometimes the sheer amount of awesome makes us go a little over budget (DoD, Caverns). Sometimes the scope/complexity makes us pull back and go below budget (Castles).

I don't want it all - or feel the need to get it all. I do feel like the DF monster is loose and hard to control at this point. I am a geek who visits the KS every day and even i had trouble keeping all the add ons straight in my head. We had at least 3 spreadsheets for calculating pieces/costs/coverage? How many threads of advice and debate as to what was best and how to optimize what budget? It really shouldn't be this complicated to buy toys

I would prefer smaller scope, more straightforward KS's I think the current model is daunting to those with casual interest and that may dampen backer numbers.

That said... I LOVED the last KS. I liked the encounter rooms as a pledge levels, a fun way to group pieces. I just wish we could have mixed and matched and got similar discount as if we bought them in sequence. As we move to more add on heavy KS's i would love to see some stretch goal love for add-on spending (a more reasonable version of what was done in KS1). I ended up going about 10% over my budget and am super excited about what i got (more than anything since Caverns). So please don't view my posts as complaints, only as advocating for what i want like everyone else.

As for the claim that "offer us fewer pieces and we'll spend more money", that just doesn't ring true. I think most returning customers approach ANY company's Kickstarter with fairly solid budget planned, and you can entice them to go a little bit to medium bit over it with some really exciting extras. But people have a gaming budget, and they will spend it. If there's not enough that tickles their fancy, they'll leave money out or divert it to another project. If there's enough cool stuff, they'll spend what they'd allocated.

I think this is pretty spot on. Using myself as an example, I went in with a pretty set budget that was going to be quite limiting in terms of what was available to purchase. I was able to get a bit more after the KS ended during the PM but not a whole lot. My limit on spending though had nothing to do with what was offered. If, for example, this KS had been extremely stripped down, lets say just a set that included floors/walls/corners plus a set of doors and then a set of elevation pieces (blocks, ramps, arches, etc.) that would definitely have limited the number of sculpts, but it wouldn't have meant I could spend more. I was still stuck by budget issues. However there is a BUT that I will get to in a moment.

Now for the WAG time. I'm not one of the big spenders. A DoD was never in the cards for me. Heck the Lava Bridge encounter wasn't in the cards for me as that would have been ALL I could get and even that would have been stretching it. However, I think that when you have somebody who has the funds to drop say $2.5k on a KS, its a lot easier for them to stretch that to say $3.1k if there are a couple of extra goodies offered than it would be for say a person with a $600 budget to stretch it to a $1.2k pledge. In one case your budget is going up by less than 25%, in the other, you are doubling it. For me, I just can't imagine dropping $2k on a gaming related KS because I just don't have the funds for it. That's not taking issue with those who do (in fact I love that people are able to do so as it helps the rest of us out).

Now for the big BUT. While I don't believe that people would necessarily spend MORE if the KS had fewer offerings, it might yield a higher profit margin for DF due to the lowered costs of production. Going back to my previous example, if the KS had been that limited, I would have likely spent about the same amount, but it would have been on fewer sculpts, meaning fewer molds, meaning a higher profit margin for DF on my purchase. The issue though is, would the people who sprang for a fully painted DoD have still spent $3.6k (or whatever it was) on such a limited release? My WAG is that no, they wouldn't have, so DF would have to factor that into their calculations as well.

Now comes the rub with the arguments about the smaller offerings (based solely on my personal situation). I get the feeling that "I can't have it all." Some people absolutely had to make a tough sacrifice of the Burrows, or the Temple, etc. whereas had Burrows been offered as its own KS, it would have been no problem. Here's the thing though, the very fact that it was Burrows that was sacrificed goes to show that other things likely had a higher priority on them. For me personally, if this KS had only been Burrows (which I realize is not exactly what people are suggesting) I would have passed completely and instead might have gone to the webstore with my money (assuming I didn't just decide to spend my money elsewhere). As a first time buyer, things like the Burrows and Temple were easy to pass because I needed the bread and butter. So I do think that all of this becomes a bit of a tough balancing act. Particularly so when there are annual KS where we want to spend a large portion of our gaming funds on (makes it harder to purchase from the store when we are still recovering from the KS).

I don't ever expect DF to give us the nitty gritty details on these things (cost-benefit analysis and the like) but I do think it is a lot more difficult to analyze than a lot of us believe. Or more simply put, there are a lot of customer profiles for DF customers. Some can drop thousands of dollars a year, most can't. At what point do the big spenders make up for the increased cost of molds? At what point would fewer molds impact the amount spent by the big spenders? These are the tough questions to which I don't believe there are easy answers aside from simple experience.

As for the claim that "offer us fewer pieces and we'll spend more money", that just doesn't ring true. I think most returning customers approach ANY company's Kickstarter with fairly solid budget planned, and you can entice them to go a little bit to medium bit over it with some really exciting extras. But people have a gaming budget, and they will spend it. If there's not enough that tickles their fancy, they'll leave money out or divert it to another project. If there's enough cool stuff, they'll spend what they'd allocated.

There's an inherent tension and contradiction in fanatic desires at play. "Make us X! Make us Y! Z would be SO cool! Whoa wait, this is way too much stuff now!" The DF sculpting crew are fanatics too, and are some darn prolific artists. Believe me, there is MORE stuff you haven't even seen that was pitched or prototyped for all the recent projects. The goal is to get as much of it out into people's hands as is reasonably possible. If I personally can't afford everything on the first go, such is life - I prioritize purchases in other areas of life too.

Very well said, GeekJeff.

Agreed! I will never understand the *makes less cool stuff and I will spend more money* argument

As I said - I am just happy its all been made and relish every wonderful piece, even the Castle Thrones etc that I couldn't get - still glad they exist!